One of the troubles in obtaining good buildings to-day, as everyone who has tried in the capacity either as owner, architect or builder must realise, lies firstly in the system of asking for competing tenders from builders, and secondly in tying down the lowest tenderer to carry out the work under a strict and binding legal contract. We look on the builder as a contractor and call him such. His chief function in modern eyes is to undertake to do a carefully specified piece of building for a fixed sum. His profit is not specified and he is free to make as much as he likes out of his operations as long as he carries out the specified work in the specified way. The real difficulty is that by no manner of means yet devised can the work be specified beforehand with absolute accuracy, nor has any means yet been discovered by which, in all the multifarious processes of building, it can be ascertained whether what has been specified has been actually carried out. We may make drawings as complete and thorough as is humanly possible; we may write long specifications and have the number of bricks, and the amount of all other material and labour to be used, assessed beforehand by a quantity surveyor, yet quality of material and workmanship enters so largely into every stage that no one can definitely say at the end that the contract has been carried out to the letter. Further, we may appoint clerks-of-work and other watch-dogs to follow the contractor at every step on the building itself, or rather to attempt it, and yet we may be fooled by work made off the site and brought to it, or by work done on the job and covered up before the architect or any of his agents, including the clerk-of-works, can see it.
The contract system of building means that directly the contract is signed, the architect, representing the interests of his client, and the contractor are there watching one another like rival detectives in a divorce case. The contractor to obtain the contract has probably put in too low a price. Everywhere in material and labour he is anxious to save except where he can find, as in practice he always can, excuse in the specifications and drawings for extras, when he is equally anxious to spend unnecessary money. I do not want to suggest that the majority of builders are not honest. Without any dishonesty in carrying out a contract, which he knows will be strictly enforced against him, the builder uses his wits to make the best living he can. If he has done a good deal of work for the same architect he may take a long view and say “I had better not do such and such a thing, because if discovered this particular architect will not ask me to tender for his work again.” I admit this often happens and to a certain extent the rigours of the contract system are thereby tempered. But who, outside a lunatic asylum, under such a system and under modern conditions, would expect good craftsmanship to flourish and good sound building to arise? That it does flourish now and then, and that good sound buildings are put up occasionally is a miracle, which I, as an architect, can only put down to some strange innate goodness in the breasts of many builders. I am afraid this goodness is chiefly to be found in those who are styled old-fashioned, in firms that have a tradition and in craftsmen who love their work, whatever they may in a monetary sense make from it.
But why should this state of affairs exist? Why should the builder be on one side and the architect on the other? Why should they not be colleagues from first to last, each helping the other with his experience? The answer is that this happy state of affairs can only take place to the benefit of everyone concerned, and particularly of the building owner, if the ordinary contract based on cut-throat tendering is abolished. By far the most satisfactory work it has been my lot to carry out, as well as the most enjoyable, has been that done under a different system—a system of actual cost plus a fixed profit. In this, to begin with, a careful estimate is made by independent quantity surveyors of the cost of the proposed work, and both the builder and the architect’s remuneration is fixed from the outset. If the building costs more than the estimate, neither profits by the excess. Of course the architect’s commission of six per cent. is so small that it cannot be considered any temptation to him to increase the cost of the building for the sake of it. Still it is more satisfactory, as an example to everyone, and more pleasant for the owner, to know exactly what he is going to pay each person.
What is the result? Everyone starts on the building operations as friends and helpers. In place of antagonistic individual effort you have team work. The larger experience of materials, which the average builder who works for many architects possesses, is placed at the architect’s and consequently at the client’s disposal. If he suggests red deal instead of yellow for a certain piece of work the architect has no reason to suppose he has some hidden motive behind his suggestion. Under the present system the architect is wont to jump to the conclusion that the yellow must be the better, because the builder has suggested the red, and, if the yellow is in the contract, he will insist on it till all is blue, and if the contractor makes a loss, he will take care to make it good elsewhere. And after all, the red might have been better for the particular position. We all know, however, even as free-traders, that the desire to buy in the cheapest market has many qualifications. Among them is human nature, and there is a great deal of human nature in building, and especially in good building. If when we set out to build we want real value for our money, as well as buildings which will be of real value to the country when we have done with them, the sooner we abolish the ordinary form of building contract the better. That is why I have called it the Anti-Social Contract.
XVIII.
AN INDICTMENT OF COAL SMOKE.
A large northern city without smoke, or indeed any English town where human beings for business reasons have to live in close proximity, is a little difficult to conceive. If it came about suddenly we who live in such places might feel not a little naked and awkward, so accustomed are we to our own dirt. We are apt, indeed, to think that dirt and dignity go hand in hand. A poet friend of mine, who had gone to live in Leeds, told me that one day on visiting his bank in that city, instead of finding it the massive gloomy black pile he expected, it stood out before him as a trifling white building in glazed terra-cotta lately washed. All its dignity and half its financial credit in his eyes had gone. Such it is to be suddenly clean in black surroundings; where before the crudeness of the architecture had been decently covered in soot it now stood forth unashamed in all its absurdity. It was a test the Leeds bank building could not stand, and it is one very few of our more modern classical buildings could. To them the smoke deposit is a grateful one, softening their crudities.
Manchester, however, has lately been cleaning, with the aid of a sandblast, some of her older classical buildings dating from a pre-smoke era, and these have stood the test nobly. The Theatre Royal is a good example. From this one might argue, and I think with some fairness, that as the pall over our towns has become heavier so our architecture has deteriorated. I think it is really a case of cause and effect, though admittedly other things aided in the decline. What is the use of Greek delicacy and refinement in mouldings and ornament when an oily black deposit will very quickly obliterate them and, as has been proved time after time, in a few short decades crumble them away? The good architect is likely to give up hope, and devote himself to clean buildings in the country, where not only mouldings but even texture counts. So we have in our smoky English towns our heavy over-ornamented buildings trying by over-emphasis in every direction to force their way through the grime, and in a clean smokeless town, like New York, light gay buildings with clean line and surface and delicate ornament leaping up to the light and trusting to their general shape and mass for their main effect. The sunny city brings about bright clean-shaven buildings, the smoky one be-whiskered coalheavers grinning at us in their oily facetiousness.
What Manchester or Leeds would be like in a few years’ time for an architect to work in if the tons of tarry acids and soot from their domestic chimneys—the chief offenders—went down the sewers, as such refuse should as long as it remains refuse, instead of falling on our heads and our buildings, is difficult to imagine. They would, one may be sure, be towns of peculiar beauty, a beauty, too, very different to that of the sunny towns of the Mediterranean. Instead of the bright colours belonging to a lower latitude we should have the far more beautiful half-tones and pearly greys belonging to our northern climate. Our buildings to correspond would have to be more delicately modelled, with less strongly marked shadows. Deep porticoes would rarely be used save to mark points of special importance. The architect, instead of being a man accustomed to think in black lines, would become sensitive, not only to every shade of colour, but to every modulation of surface and texture. No longer could we tolerate the hard, bright, cheery reds of our machine-made pressed bricks. The black joints, too, in which we set our brickwork, grinding cinders into our mortar where the south uses sand, would seem to be what they are, so many dirty lines drawn across the fair faces of our buildings, and thereby adding most unnecessarily to the gloom. A vulgar moulding too, an over-emphasized piece of ornament, would become so conspicuous in proper daylight, when all the surroundings would be clean, that the author of it would begin to be cut by his fellow-architects, and even his lay friends as a man of bad and flamboyant taste. For it must be remembered we have already reached the stage where a sin against taste, when realised, is far worse than one against morals. Indeed, the reactions of clean air and the beautifully tempered sunlight which really belongs to Lancashire would be infinite. With the coating of soot removed from our lungs as well as the black from our buildings we should probably all talk with the sprightliness of the Athenians of old. An architectural public opinion would be one of the first things to form, and woe betide the architect and client who spoilt with his coarse work our modern Athens. An effect which old Athens lacked we could have in abundance. The foliage of beautiful feathery yet rounded trees suited to a town, which grow in our climate but not in hers, might make the foil to the buildings of our main streets which the London plane trees do to the painted buildings of the London squares. Our parks, too, would become clean. They might then cease to be the dreary recreation grounds, with asphalt paths and a weedy sprinkling of grass, we now assume, unrightly I think, to be all that is possible in the heart of a city.
All this I realise may be thought fanciful, though it is fancy based on fact. Here, then, are solid facts no one can dispute. Sir Frank Baines, chief architect to the Office of Works, than whom no one has more experience of the upkeep of buildings, stated in his evidence before the Committee on Smoke Abatement that the cost of the upkeep of a building would be reduced by at least half if a smoke-free atmosphere obtained. The material damage to Manchester by its own smoke has been calculated at £1,000,000 a year. But more important even than these figures is the disrepute and disregard into which its soot has brought such towns. There is the story, probably apocryphal and certainly unwarranted, though useful enough in pointing a moral, of the Cabinet Minister who had a speaking engagement, and not feeling very well went to see a leading consultant, and asked whether he was fit to keep his engagement, which happened to be in Manchester. “Manchester?” said the consultant, “certainly not. Nobody is well enough to go to Manchester.”